I want to talk to you all, especially those who would live in churches, belong to churches like the Catholic Church. That is very, very rooted in ritual rituals. What are they? Why are they so important? Well, one thing we could say about them is that they’re not magic. First of all, they don’t.

Just because you go through a ritual doesn’t mean that it’s changed you or that it’s done, its within you. It’s not magic, but it’s something more etheric, more mysterious. And what it is, is you with someone else or in a large, say, with you. And let’s take two rituals. The ritual in our Catholic Church of having your sins forgiven, the ritual of celebrating the Mass, those are the two things that Catholics do on a regular basis. Okay?

When you go to a priest and sit there and tell him your sins, and he asks, you know, he gives you a penance and then he tells you forgiven. If that is, if that what that seems, if that’s all it seems to you is that you’ve gone to that place, you’ve said it doesn’t matter how you feel about it, where you are, with the whole issue of the weakness that’s involved in your sin, you just go and you just want to get rid of it, and you get rid of it. What did you celebrate? Some kind of magic event where the priest just poof, takes away your sin? No, you experience the priest praying through the church for you that God who sees you, knows you, loves you, understands everything about you. He’s telling you this ritual is a celebration of the reality of God’s love for you as a sinner.

And when you feel that, when you experience that in sacrament of confession in the ritual, then it works. The Liturgy of the Eucharist. We gather, we listen to a teaching, the first part of the Mass, and then you go into a ritual and the ritual is so amazing. You take this piece of bread and some wine and you eat it. And you believe that that is God entering into you. Does that mean at that moment, no matter what you’re doing or how you’re feeling, when you put that host into you now, then God is there?

No, God is already there. So what does the ritual do? It doesn’t make it happen. It celebrates the reality of it in a room filled with other people that believe it. And what you’re looking for in every ritual is not that it affects just automatically what it celebrates. No, it creates the experience of knowing.

Knowing this is real. God forgives all sin. That’s reality. You have to feel it. God is in you right now, always in you. When you go into the church, he’s in you.

When you leave the church, he’s in you. But you’ve had an experience with other people that remind you of the reality, make it more real, and then it’s valuable. So rituals can be misused so easily. They’re not magic. They don’t make the thing happen automatically. They’re communal.

With you and a priest, you and a priest and a community, it’s a communal experience of reality. And without it, it’s hard to hang on to those mysterious, wonderful truths of our faith. He’s with you. He forgives you. That’s who he is.